Dell EMC Unity vs. IntelliFlash

Dell EMC Unity is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 113 reviews vs IntelliFlash which is ranked 15th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 5 reviews. The top reviewer of Dell EMC Unity writes "Hits a sweet spot for us between price point and the amount of storage and performance". The top reviewer of IntelliFlash writes "It provides a combination of protocols without losing deduplication and compression". Dell EMC Unity is most compared with HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, NetApp All Flash FAS and Pure Storage FlashArray. IntelliFlash is most compared with Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and Dell EMC Unity. See our Dell EMC Unity vs. IntelliFlash report.

Quotes From Members Comparing Dell EMC Unity vs. IntelliFlash

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

It is easy to scale, maintain, and manage.They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use.It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process.Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system.Integration; We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares.Purchasing; We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.They've integrated NAS and SAN pretty well. It made replication very simple. Because one of our systems has a lot of LANs, for it to replicate we have Consistency Groups in there. That's something that is really helpful, making sure that everything is working not just for replication but for backups as well.The solution is so easy to manage that I forget it is there.

It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust.EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disksIt provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression.Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the databaseHigh performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features.

The support portal needs fixing. ﻿Accessing a service request on the support portal seems to be a bit difficult, as opposed to just calling the 800 number.Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that.﻿﻿It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual.The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing.It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity.There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide.I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage.We've got an ongoing issue with a Unity where some power supply fans spin up. We've had a whole bunch of hardware changed as a result but I still have an open SR which has been a struggle. It doesn't seem to affect performance, but it's something that we're hoping the engineers can resolve. Also, we had some issues with an upgrade where we can't manage a device, after the upgrade. So we had to have a ticket in for that.

It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition.We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors.In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation.It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element.Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device.

Go with the virtual appliance versus the hardware.Licensing is fine. We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.The pricing is reasonable. We're using the Flex on Demand pricing. It's really good for us when we pay for what we use. It made it easy to get it inside since it's an OpEx and instead of CapEx expense.Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government.The pricing is competitive. We miss some of the feature functionality that we had with the XtremeIOs but it's certainly suitable for the purpose.In the SQL Server instances in our data warehouse, we immediately saw a great return on investment.Licensing is a little bit confusing. Going through everything with them, there are a lot of line items to go over. Every single thing is broken down into a line item, and it starts to get really confusing in terms of what we're actually purchasing when it comes to the product.The ROI is right where we need it to be. It's a reasonably priced array.

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